Practical approaches to efficient screening: information-rich screening protocol.

The past approach of high-throughput screening of everything in the corporate collection has been shown to be very expensive in terms of reagents cost, disposal cost, and compound collection depletion. It is well known that screening campaigns produce several hits, of which only 50% confirm on average. More efficient ways of screening can provide an informative structure-activity relationship (SAR), which in turn can be used to build mathematical models for further probing the activity space and directing chemical synthesis. The authors report new methods and insights to extract the maximum possible information from a screening experiment and find most of the possible hits in the corporate collection while screening as few compounds as possible.